Fuddland
Just twenty miles or so west of Suzhou lies Tai Hu, the third largest lake in China, easily reached from Suzhou on the number 502 public bus from opposite the train station [well, it’s opposite the train station at the time of writing. There’s so much construction going on around there at the moment, the bus stops are continually being moved around]. You can also take a minibus from the bus station down the road, but why pay a lot more just for a bit more comfort? It’s only four yuan for the hour-long journey if you take the 502, and you get to see a bit more of the surrounding towns as it winds its way through them, rather than taking the express route.
The two most popular spots around the east shore of the lake are Dong Shan and Xi Shan—East Hill and West Hill—famed for their orchards and other agricultural output, as well as offering vantage points from which to gaze out over the lake. They are frequently both referred to as islands, but in fact Dong Shan is a peninsula, and whilst Xi Shan is an island, it’s connected to the mainland via a bridge.
Thanks to some fortuitous scheduling, Rose and I both had a Monday off, so we were able to go out to the lake when most people are at work, which we thought would make for a more peaceful day. Unfortunately, the lack of other visitors had the opposite effect: as the bus pulled up to the final stop in the small town near the lake at Dong Shan, eight or nine motorised rickshaw drivers were lying in wait.
[Aside: I’m really not quite sure what to call these vehicles, but I know “motorised rickshaw” isn’t quite right. There’s usually one wheel at the front, where the driver sits, which sometimes a kind of motorbike, sometimes more like a very small car, with a two-seater, two-wheeled “box” behind it for the passengers to sit. Rose calls them “tuk-tuks”—I’m not sure why, and I’ve taken to referring to them as such, but every time I call them that to someone other than Rose, I have to explain what I mean. For lack of a more widely-recognised term, and because I like the onomatopoeic quality of it, I’ll be calling them tuk-tuks from now on.]
We got off the bus and were immediately surrounded [literally] by the drivers, all yelling at us to take their tuk-tuks around Dong Shan. As usual, the more they yelled, the less I wanted to use them, so we ignored them whilst we discussed what we should do next. Rose’s suggestion was to start snogging in the hope that our unashamed display of affection would make them so uncomfortable that they’d shut up and leave us alone, but I’m far too English for that kind of thing, so we opted to simply make a break for it and walk in what we thought was the general direction of the shoreline.
This managed to shake off the majority of the drivers, but two of them started to follow us, all the time barking their prices and waving their maps in our faces. We kept telling them we didn’t want their services, but they were completely oblivious to those particular words, in the selectively-deaf way many salespeople are. One woman, matching us stride for stride on foot, was so outrageously rude in her touting that Rose finally stopped and asked her if she actually understood our Mandarin. She replied that, yes, she did, and that seemed to get rid of her for some reason. Loss of face, perhaps? One down, one to go.
The other driver was trundling alongside us in his tuk-tuk, all the time shouting, “Mister! Miss! Two yuan a kilometre!” Seeing as he too was completely ignoring our rejections, we had a little fun with him, double-backing on ourselves as we walked behind a large truck, dodging down narrow side-streets, hoping he’d get fed-up of making all the u-turns and stop-starting. But this was obviously how he was used to getting customers: by simply following them all day long until they got tired and fell into his waiting tuk-tuk. Not us though! [It’s a shame neither of us knew how to tell him he was wasting his petrol by stopping and starting all the time.] On the plus side, it was quite interesting seeing the alleyways and looking at the housing in the town as our irritating stalker continued to chase us.
But at one point—and this is when I really started to get annoyed—he changed tactics, stopped his tuk-tuk, opened the door, got out on crutches and pointed at his crippled foot. I mean, really! Playing the sympathy card after a good twenty minutes of following us and constantly being told we didn’t want to use his taxi? We ducked down a side-street behind some houses just as another driver rolled by and looked as though he was about to join the chase. We were hoping that this street was narrow or uneven enough for them not to follow, for they both seemed to give up, but then the second driver called after us that we were heading down a dead-end, so they were clearly just waiting for us to come back the way we came.
Sure enough, we soon reached a point where we had no choice but to turn around, and just as we did so we heard the ominous putt-putt-putt [or tuk-tuk-tuk] of a driver fast approaching. To our relief, it wasn’t the leech that had been sapping our patience, but that second one who tried to tell us about the dead end. Rose and I decided that his attempt at a warning made him a decent person, and [having checked our own map and realised we wouldn’t actually be able walk to the places we wanted to see] we allowed him to proffer his services.
It’s possible, and perhaps usual, to hire these drivers for the day for a reasonable rate [after some negotiating]—they can wait by the roadside whilst you check out a particular place of interest, then take you on to the next one, but we really only wanted him to take us to one place then bugger off, so we offered him a flat fee a bit lower than his initial price-per-kilometre, which he eventually accepted, and off we headed to Longtou Shan down some really quite badly-maintained roads, our driver telling us not to be afraid as we bumped and lurched along.
